Chicago's cutting-edge, never-built architecture

At the Expo 72 Gallery on Randolph, there is a 160-foot panorama of Chicago's skyline. Using an app, visitors can look at different ideas for the city's skyline — soaring concepts that never were completed.

The retrospective, which runs until September 29, was organized by Alexander Eisenschmidt, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Photo

City of Chicago

Expo 72's exhibit, called "Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future."

Some of the projects featured:

• Alternative schemes for Tribune Tower, such as "gaping scars, a honeycomb facade or a top like a graduate's mortarboard."

• An 1880s design for a building called the "Beacon of Progress," which would have been a 1,500-foot-high structure (almost as tall as the Sears Tower) that included 13 obelisks representing America's 13 original colonies

• And a 1990s idea for a "Stranded Sears Tower," transforming the building's nine vertical tubes "into a mound of steel pasta."

The Atlantic writes that the reasons vary for why these futuristic structures never reached fruition. "Sometimes the technology didn't exist to build so high or so massive. Sometimes they were designed to remain as conceptual drawings." And cost, the Atlantic writes, "was another big factor."

Click here to see The Atlantic's feature and the drawings of the visionary projects.